


South

by alcibiades



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gun Violence, Isolation, M/M, Travel, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, awkward teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 03:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6499516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day Trevor died might have been a Thursday. Zeke couldn't say for sure; it had been Trevor who insisted they keep a calendar in the first place, and there had been days when neither of them could remember with any certainty whether or not they'd marked the calendar off. It was kind of funny—here they were in the apocalypse, and they were carrying around this little Moleskine day planner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	South

The day Trevor died might have been a Thursday. Zeke couldn't say for sure; it had been Trevor who insisted they keep a calendar in the first place, and there had been days when neither of them could remember with any certainty whether or not they'd marked the calendar off. It was kind of funny—here they were in the apocalypse, and they were carrying around this little Moleskine day planner.

What was certain was that it was fall. They were trying to move south before winter hit, but it was slow going; there weren't very many unlocked cars around anymore that were still functional, and neither Trevor nor Zeke knew anything substantial about fixing cars. Mostly they walked or occasionally biked if the terrain was flat enough.

It had been October before the weather had really started to cool down. There was a morning when they woke up and the air had gone crisp and some of the leaves had started to turn yellow. Trevor had looked outside at the bright, bold blue sky and then turned to Zeke and said, "We have to get out of Minnesota before winter or we're fucked."

Zeke wasn't really sure where they were, the day Trevor died. Between the two of them, Trevor had been better at navigation. He had been better at most things, honestly. You wouldn't had expected it from looking at him—he was thin, with longish hair and a sort of delicacy to his features that suggested softness—but his dad had been ex-military, paranoid, and some brand of PTSD had made him push Trevor to learn a lot of basic survival skills.

There had been a skirmish. They were passing through a town, which they normally would have skirted, but they needed to stop for supplies. They didn't have much left in the way of first aid.

They were in a CVS. It had been mostly ransacked; Zeke was rifling through the overturned shelves at the front of the store and Trevor had gone back to the pharmacy to see if there was anything of use back there. There were a lot of antacids, and Zeke was shuffling the bottles around, looking for Tylenol, ibuprofen, any kind of painkillers, when he heard a scuffle in the back.

By the time he made it back to Trevor, it was over. There had been four of them and Trevor had clubbed their heads in with the butt of his shotgun. He was breathing heavily, leaning forward with his hands on his knees, but he looked okay. "Let's get out of here," he said to Zeke. "There's nothing in here that's worth the risk."

Looking back on it, Zeke probably should have recognized it as being unlike Trevor. Trevor was normally so thorough, so conscientious. But he didn't say anything—he was tired of it, tired of this whole thing, of scraping by, of stopping and looking through all this junk, of walking all day, every day. "Okay," he said. He followed Trevor out through the front of the store.

It was later that day when Trevor started to get sick. At first, Zeke couldn't tell, but Trevor kept needing to stop for a minute, and around the fourth or fifth time, as they were making their way through an overgrown cornfield, Zeke came up next to him and could see that Trevor was greenish and shiny with sweat.

"It's probably nothing," Trevor said. "The weather change, you know, I probably just caught a cold, or it might be allergies." He wiped sweaty hair away from his face; it turned darker, almost the color of blood, when it was damp. His eyes were huge and green with purple circles underneath them. "Fuck. I hate to slow us down."

Zeke felt Trevor's forehead. He was really hot. "It's okay," he said. "We already walked most of the day. Let's see if there's a barn or something."

They found a barn with some piles of slightly moldy hay and Zeke unrolled both of their blankets from their backpacks as Trevor sat shivering in the corner. "Come over here," Zeke said. "It's gonna get cold in the night."

"Yeah, but I don't want to get you sick," Trevor said. "It'll be twice as slow if we're both sick." He shook his head. "I'm just gonna sleep over here. Bring me the blanket?"

Zeke did, draping it over Trevor as Trevor reached weakly for it. "You don't want to eat?" he asked, crouching down. "Not even like a granola bar or something?"

"No," said Trevor. "I'm just gonna go to sleep. It's okay. I'll probably be really hungry in the morning."

"All right, man," Zeke said, giving Trevor's glassy eyes and sweat-soaked hair a final glance and then retreating. True to his word, Trevor fell asleep right away. Zeke ate dinner, put up a perimeter around the barn, and then went back inside. He watched Trevor sleep for a while; a few curls of Trevor’s hair had fallen into his face and shifted slightly with every exhalation. His expression was peaceful, even if he was still obviously damp with sweat. Eventually, Zeke settled into one of the piles of hay, and fell asleep himself.

When he woke up in the morning he was stiff and sore, cold without the benefit of Trevor's additional body heat. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, immediately looking over to Trevor, who was still huddled in the corner, covered up to his chin in the blanket. "Trev," said Zeke. Usually that was enough to wake him, but—

"Trev?" said Zeke, stumbling a little over the hay, and jogging over to Trevor. He stared down at Trevor for a second; he was very pale, grayish, and it didn't look like he was breathing. "Trevor," said Zeke again, kneeling down, pulling the blanket away from Trevor.

He wasn't hot. He was cold. Zeke's hand shook as he touched Trevor's skin. It was so weird, because he had just felt Trevor's forehead the night before and it had been completely different. Now it was stiff, almost waxy. Zeke felt down along his jaw, to his neck. There was no pulse.

He sat back heavily. He knew what he had to do. They had talked about this. They just hadn't really talked about what would come afterward. He looked at Trevor's face, his closed eyelids, the dark brown eyelashes and the webbing of blue veins. "Trevor," he said. His mouth was dry, and his throat clicked. "I'm scared."

+++

The first time he met Trevor, he had been running. It was one of those situations where he didn't have much of a choice but to run; he had a baseball bat, but the combination of the number of undead coming for him and his unsteady nerves meant he wasn't a lot of good with it. He'd gotten a couple of hits in on one of them, but only enough to slow it down, and the other five were still coming for him. It was a lot easier and more reliable to run. He'd been varsity track all four years of high school. He had practice running.

It was going fine until he hit a door that wouldn't open. He didn't know if it was jammed shut, or locked, or what, but he put his whole weight into it and it wouldn’t budge. They weren't far behind him; he turned to look and then lifted his foot and tried to kick the door, unsuccessfully.

A shot rang out. He'd never heard gunfire in real life before, but somehow he realized what it was immediately and froze. One of the zombies exploded into a shower of gore and crumpled to the ground. "What are you doing?" someone shouted. "Keep going!"

Another shot rang out, and another. Two more of the undead fell. Zeke got his wits about him enough to smash the fourth one in the head with his bat; it was rotten enough that its head collapsed like an old pumpkin. A final shot rang out and the last one fell down. Zeke stared around himself, looking for the source of the gunfire, and eventually he saw someone duck out of a window.

A couple of minutes later, the shooter came from the wide-open front door of the building. He couldn't have been any older than Zeke—he looked younger, actually, tall and skinny with a wild mess of wavy auburn hair. "Are you alone?" he asked Zeke, hand still on his shotgun.

Zeke nodded, not sure if he should put his hands up. "Me too," said the other guy. "We should stick together. This'll be easier with two of us than it would be alone." He tilted his head, pulling down on the hem of his grimy t-shirt. "What's your name?"

"Zeke," he said.

"Zeke," said the other guy. He said it with a familiar cadence, the slight Midwestern twang of a long ‘e,’ and then nodded, as if he was satisfied. He squinted at Zeke, hands on his hips now. His jeans had holes in the knees. "I'm Trevor. Have you been by yourself this whole time? How'd you make it this long?"

"Uh," Zeke said. "Yeah. I don't know. I run away a lot. I'm fast."

"Yeah, I saw that," Trevor said. "Okay. Um, we should move out. The sound of the gunfire might draw more of them this way. Come with me, I have a place set up about a mile and a half from here."

Zeke started after him immediately, picking his way through the broken glass, around the burnt-out shells of cars, and was uncomfortably reminded of his mom. She had always been urging him to be a leader, not a follower, but here he was yet again, following somebody. And she—she was probably dead. Almost certainly dead. Or worse.

The place that Trevor had set up turned out to be an apartment on the third floor of a building. "It's empty," he explained. "I made sure the rest of the building was empty. All the doors are locked. It's not really safe—I mean, nothing is really safe—but it's pretty good for now."

There were whole stores of bottled water, food, a bunch of first-aid supplies, and a fire escape accessible from the back of the apartment. "There's only one bed," Trevor said, "but there's a couch. We can take turns."

"Okay," said Zeke. He saw himself in an unbroken mirror for the first time in a while—dusty, dark skin, overgrown hair, slightly wild eyes.

"Hey," Trevor said, putting the shotgun aside and coming around to look him in the face. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," said Zeke, snapping himself out of it. "Yeah, I'm fine. It's just—you're the first living person I've seen since—"

He tapered off, but he figured he didn't really have to explain what he meant. "Me too," Trevor said after a minute. "Me too."

+++

He couldn't make himself do it. He knew Trevor would have been mad, but he stared down at Trevor's still face, and it looked exactly the same as every other time he'd seen Trevor asleep, and he couldn't do it.

He couldn't just leave Trevor there, either. So he went out behind the barn and dug a shallow grave. The soil was surprisingly loose and sandy; he wondered absently how it had ever been good for growing crops.

Trevor was stiff and hard to carry. He wasn't that heavy, but now the weight was all dead weight, and Zeke ended up half-dragging him, sweating and frustrated, suffused with a terrible, hot guilt. He put Trevor in the hole, and then had to dig it out a little more to accommodate the way Trevor had been sleeping curled up. He stood staring down at Trevor in the hole, a few stray clods of dirt scattered over his pale face, for what felt like a long time.

A thought came to him, totally unbidden: it had been a while after he met Trevor before Zeke had felt like he had a right to ask questions. Trevor seemed to project an aura of being closed-off, as if he was somehow completely self-contained as a person. Zeke had never met somebody like that before. He wanted so badly to know more about Trevor—the kind of stupid things you asked anybody when you were making friends: where was he from? Why was he alone when Zeke had met him? How long had he been alone? Did he have any siblings?—but he was afraid to ask.

They had been on a supply run. Certain parts of town were more-or-less cleared out of the undead; Trevor had killed some of them, he said, and some of them had just starved. So, until they completely cleaned out the stores of what useful supplies remained, it was a fairly low-risk enterprise. They were walking side-by-side down the empty street, pushing a cart full of canned goods and first aid kits. "Where were you when it started?" Trevor asked.

Zeke blinked at him in surprise. "In school," he said.

"In school?" Trevor asked. "How old are you?"

"Eighteen," Zeke said. "I just turned eighteen a couple weeks before—I was a senior in high school. I went to a private school. My mom took me out of public school; she put me in this charter school because she was concerned about the quality of my educational experience.”

"What does that even mean?" said Trevor.

"I don't know," Zeke said. "I was still the only black kid in my class, but people were nicer to me, I guess." He went in front of the cart and kicked a few pieces of rock and debris out of the way. "What about you?" he asked. "Where were you?"

"I was with my dad," Trevor said. "He took me out of school; we were camping. It was supposed to be fun." He ducked his head, but kept pushing the cart. "He did that a lot. He would have me on the weekends and then instead of doing something normal, he'd make me go out in the woods with him and he'd teach me all this shit. Making fires, building shelters, catching animals. And then he'd make me repeat it back to him. I hated it. All I wanted to do was something normal."

Zeke didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything. Trevor's shoulders were tight, and Zeke couldn't see his face. "And now he's dead," said Trevor. "And I'm still here."

"He might not be dead," Zeke said, knowing how stupid it was even as he said it. "He might still be out there—"

"He's dead," Trevor said fiercely, jerking his chin up. His face was red and his eyes were wet. "I saw it happen. I know he's dead. I know it."

Trevor stopped dead in his tracks. For a second, Zeke didn't know what to do, and then it hit him how idiotic that was. He leaned his baseball bat against the cart and came around to the other side of it. "I'm sorry," he said, and reached over to Trevor, pulling him into a hug.

Trevor stayed stiff for a few moments, and then his arms came up around Zeke too. They didn't stay that way for long—it left them too exposed—but the entire time they were walking back to the apartment, Zeke couldn't help but feel like something had changed. Here he was, thinking of Trevor as some kind of puzzle, or a closed door, but Trevor was just a person. And just like Zeke, he was scared as hell.

+++

The worst part wasn't burying Trevor; the worst part actually came several hours after that. After he filled in the grave, Zeke went back in the barn and picked up Trevor's backpack. It was heavy, but he'd gotten a lot stronger in the past few months, and he could manage it along with his own. He looked at the blanket Trevor had been sleeping under, but rather than shove it back into one of their packs, he just left it. The only thing left was Trevor’s shotgun.

He felt wrong holding it. He'd shot it before, of course—Trevor had taught him how—but the shotgun was without a doubt _Trevor's_ , and taking it felt weird. It would have been unforgivably dumb to leave it, though. So he slung it over his shoulder with everything else, pulled out the map, and started walking.

It wasn't until later that it really hit him. It was starting to get dark, and he was just walking along a two-lane country highway, past the same overgrown fields and farmhouses he'd been seeing all day. The extra weight of the second pack was making his shoulder hurt, and he looked behind himself to ask if Trevor could take it, but Trevor wasn't there.

Trevor wasn't there. He wasn't ever going to be there again. Suddenly Zeke regretted every moment he'd only been half paying attention when Trevor taught him something. He regretted taking it for granted when Trevor could build a fire, or knew what kind of plants were good to eat, or how to fix a gun when it jammed. He was alone now. There was no reason to tell stupid jokes, because there was nobody to laugh at them. Even if he found another group somehow, even if he survived that long, whoever he found wouldn't be the same, because they wouldn't be Trevor. He realized something he'd never thought about before: he and Trevor had been with each other more or less all the time for almost six months and they'd never once fought.

He sat down right in the middle of the road. His eyes filmed over with tears almost immediately. He hadn't cried in a long time, maybe since he'd been fourteen and his rabbit had died. But now that he'd started, he couldn't stop; it took over his entire body, wracking him with tremors. He cried so hard he threw up, a watery mess that burned coming up but looked completely insubstantial once it hit the pavement. Then he got up, and walked over to the nearest farmhouse.

He'd been so afraid that he might not be able to sleep, but crying had left him wiped-out. He laid down in a bed for the first time in a while, without Trevor there to tell him sleeping on the second floor was probably a bad idea, and he slept like the dead.

He got up the next day and did it all over again.

+++

It seemed impossible that things were so much more bleak without Trevor around. He'd been on his own for a few weeks before he'd met Trevor, after all—but then, he'd been more concerned with surviving. Now, it felt like he'd settled into a routine. Maybe that was it: it was a routine. It wasn't really life.

He woke up every morning, wherever he'd slept the night before, ate some of his rapidly-dwindling supply of protein bars, drank a bottle of water, and kept walking. He walked all day, until he was too tired to keep going, or it was too dark to see—whichever came first—and then he found someplace to take shelter, and went to sleep.

This time of year should have been beautiful. In fact, from an unbiased perspective, it was. It was strangely peaceful, out here in the country; most of the zombies must have starved, or moved toward larger population centers. He could go a whole day, or more, without even seeing a single one. Besides that, the leaves had really started to change, whole stands of maple going up in red and yellows, the endless fields shading to a silvery-purple. The sky was still so blue.

Zeke didn't care about any of that, though. He didn't really care about anything. He just knew he had to keep walking, to go south. That had been the plan. Beyond that, there was nothing.

He was holed up in a shed for the night. It was barely big enough to stretch out in, but it had been the closest to the road, and since he'd walked himself into exhaustion, it seemed like the best option. He strung up the usual perimeter of tin cans and glass outside the shed, and the only reason he didn't just lay down and go to sleep on the floor was that he knew he'd be sore the next day if he did.

He fell asleep quickly, and woke up disoriented some hours later when he heard the metal and glass clanking together. Immediately, he fumbled for the shotgun; the sounds of the perimeter rattling continued for a moment, and then the door of the shed rattled.

He knew from experience that trying to wait it out wasn't much of a solution. The dead didn't feel the pain that would stop them from grinding their hands—or whatever other part—down to the bone trying to open a door. They'd just keep going until they fell apart or the door did.

He checked the shotgun to make sure it was loaded, undid the deadbolt on the door, took a deep breath, and then kicked it open with enough force to send the zombie behind it stumbling backwards. He raised the gun into the pitch darkness outside and took aim as the zombie came back into view.

It was Trevor.

Zeke stared at him, his aim wavering. Trevor had both hands raised, and his eyes closed, his expression almost a wince, like he was expecting pain. His white t-shirt was streaked the sandy-brown color of the soil in which Zeke had buried him, and there were clods of dirt in his hair.

"Please don't shoot me," said Trevor.

+++

"What did you want to be?" Trevor asked, handing Zeke a bottle of water, the shotgun leaning against his pack as they stared out over the fire into the darkening sky.

"What do you mean?" Zeke asked.

Trevor gave him a look, like _duh, come on_. "I mean like, after you graduated. We were both seniors, right? What did you want to do, where did you want to go to college?"

"Oh," Zeke said. "Geeze, don't look at me like that, it's such a vague question. Uh—I didn't know, I guess. Everyone in my family is in medicine, so I guess I always figured I'd end up doing that."

"Medicine is hard," Trevor said. "It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you just fall into."

Zeke shrugged. "My dad's an ophthalmologist, mom's a nurse, sister's a virologist. I guess I just always thought it must run in the family. I don't know. My grades were okay. I got accepted into a few colleges. Undergrad doesn't even matter that much anyway, right?"

"I don't know," Trevor said. "Nobody in my family has a graduate degree."

"Oh," Zeke said. "Sorry, is—am I being weird?"

"No," Trevor said. "I like talking to you. It makes me feel more normal. I think it would be weirder if we had the same exact life experiences up until now. That wouldn't be very exciting, would it?"

"I mean, are we lacking for excitement?" Zeke asked; when Trevor looked at him, he smiled, and Trevor smiled back. "Anyway, what did you want to be?"

"A psychologist," said Trevor. "I was going to do U of M for undergrad. They offered me a pretty good scholarship."

"That's kind of funny," Zeke said. "I don't even care about being a doctor and that was just what I assumed I would do, and you actually _wanted_ to be one and—now neither of us can."

Trevor laughed. "You have a weird sense of humor," he said. He laughed again; he had a nice laugh, surprisingly loud and clear. "Fuck, it _is_ kind of funny. Now come on, help me put the fire out, we should get to sleep."

+++

"Trevor?" said Zeke. He put the shotgun down.

Trevor opened his eyes - one of them was horribly bloodshot and his pupils were two different sizes. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find you," he said, lowering his hands slowly. "You covered a lot of distance."

Zeke couldn't find a single thing to say. He could only stare at Trevor, his mouth hanging open. Trevor didn't look too good. He was still unnaturally pale, his lips purplish, his fingers bruised almost black. Some capillaries looked like they'd burst around his nose. He looked like exactly what he was: a freshly-risen corpse. But he was—talking, standing there, sounding and acting just like the Trevor Zeke had known.

"Zeke?" said Trevor. "Um, say something?"

"What the fuck," Zeke managed.

Trevor came over and sat down right in front of Zeke, half-in and half-out of the doorway of the shed. "You didn't shoot me," he said. "You were supposed to shoot me." He reached out and took Zeke's hand where it dangled near the shotgun; his skin was cold, and he very clearly had no pulse. "It was what we talked about. We agreed."

"I know," Zeke said. He felt like his brain was still trailing behind somewhere, but the words were coming out of his mouth just fine. "I couldn't do it. I just—I know I was supposed to, but I couldn't. I couldn't do it." He reached out with his free hand and shakily touched the slightly stiff skin of Trevor's cheek.

"You buried me, though," said Trevor.

"Yeah," Zeke said. "It seemed like the right thing to do. I wasn't going to just leave you there, I'm—" He paused, shaking his head as if that would rattle his thoughts into some kind of order. "How is this even possible? How are you here, how are you— _you_?"

"I don't know," Trevor said. "I woke up feeling horrible, and I mean—I remember—I remember dying, I knew what had happened, but I don't know why. I just woke up and I dug myself out, and I knew what direction you would be going, so I started walking. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find you, but I realized I can smell you."

"Like…you want to eat me, or something?" said Zeke.

"No," said Trevor, recoiling a little. "Just like—anything warm, anything alive, I can smell it. I mean, I'm _hungry_ , but not that way."

"Do you want a protein bar?" Zeke asked.

"I better not," said Trevor. "I think, um, being hungry is just something I might have to get used to."

"Okay," Zeke said, still unable to believe he was real. It was kind of like the past few days had just been a bad dream, except that Trevor's cold skin where he was still gripping Zeke's hand was incontrovertible proof that it had happened. Zeke shook his head again. "What do we do now?" he asked.

"You should go back to sleep," said Trevor. "You need the rest. And I guess—in the morning, we'll keep going. We still need to get somewhere warmer before winter hits."

"I don't think this shed's big enough to fit two people," Zeke said, leaning back and looking at the tiny, crowded space.

"It's okay," Trevor said. "I'm not tired. I'll keep watch."

Zeke pulled himself back into the shed and lay down, but despite how tired he'd been, he couldn't fall asleep. He kept thinking to himself, what if he woke up the next day and Trevor was gone again? What if it had all been some kind of hallucination or dream? He'd lost Trevor once, and he didn't know if he could stand to lose him again. He had to hold on tighter this time. He had to do better.

The shed door opened after some time had passed and Trevor leaned in, silhouetted by the sparse moonlight. "Hey," he said. "I can hear you breathing, I know you're not asleep. It's okay; I'll still be here in the morning."

He ducked out again after a moment, pulling the door shut. Zeke covered his face with his hands, and closed his eyes.

+++

He woke up the next morning and lay there for a minute staring at the ceiling of the shed, wondering if he had dreamed it all. But when he got up and opened the door, Trevor was sitting there, looking even paler and grayer than he had the night before. "Hi," said Zeke, rubbing his eyes.

"Hi," Trevor said. "You look…freaked out."

"I kind of am," said Zeke. "Are you not?"

"I don't know," Trevor said. "I guess not. Freaking out wouldn't really serve much of a purpose for me, would it?"

Zeke dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. "You know I can't help it, right?" he said. "You look—you look pretty bad in the sunlight, you know."

"I didn't mean it that way," Trevor said. "I'm not blaming you for being freaked out, Zeke. It's probably more normal to be freaked out. I'm sorry." He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers. "Do I really look bad?"

"You look…very dead," Zeke said.

Trevor groaned, tipping his head back against the shed. "Well," he said eventually, as Zeke unwrapped a protein bar and ate it, "I guess I am, so."

"I didn't really mean you looked bad," Zeke said. "You still look like you. Just dead." He squinted at Trevor. "Do you want a power bar?"

"No," Trevor said. "I'm okay. You save them for yourself."

Zeke nodded, finishing the protein bar, crumpling up the wrapper and sticking it in his backpack. "So you want to just—keep going?" he asked Trevor, squinting against the bright morning sun. "I guess that's our best option."

"I don't know if it matters for me," said Trevor, "but definitely for you, yeah. We still need to get somewhere warm. You've been making good time the past few days. If we keep it up, we have a pretty good chance."

Zeke didn't ask him _a chance at what_ , because it was pretty irrelevant. "Okay," he said, nodding. He got up with a groan—he was sore, despite trying to avoid it. He offered a hand to Trevor, who took it and pulled himself up too. Zeke took a moment to orient himself, shouldering his pack, and then he and Trevor started walking.

+++

They walked and walked. Zeke got the feeling from watching Trevor that he could probably have walked forever and never needed to stop. He didn't seem to sleep at night anymore. He didn't drink water or eat anything. It was getting properly cold now, but Trevor seemed perfectly comfortable in his worn-out t-shirt, jeans, and ratty Converse. When Zeke watched him, he honestly couldn't tell if Trevor was even breathing.

They didn't really talk about it at night. Most of the time Zeke was too tired from walking all day and staying constantly on high alert to want to do anything other than eat and go to sleep. Sometimes they talked while they walked, nonsensical stuff, like trying to remember the plots of movies they'd seen, or playing word games.

He felt like he was still carrying something fragile inside him, something he hadn't been able to fully acknowledge. It was like one of those parenting classes, where you had to carry around an egg, or a baby doll, and if you dropped it you'd fail. Trevor had said, though, that freaking out wouldn't serve much of a purpose, and as far as Zeke could tell, he was right. So his best—his only—friend had died and come back a zombie. So Trevor wasn't the same as any other kind of zombie Zeke had ever seen before. So what? They had to keep going. This was only the latest in a long line of incredibly fucked-up occurrences.

"Maybe we should take a break," Trevor said one day, looking over at Zeke. His face was set in a squint; Zeke couldn't read his expression, but he had a feeling that Trevor meant Zeke wasn't looking so good. And honestly, he wasn't feeling too good either. He'd turned the corner into just being exhausted all the time, dragging his feet when he walked.

Zeke felt like he should put up some kind of token protest, but he didn't have the energy. "Okay," he said.

"We can find somewhere there's a real bed," Trevor said. He didn't add _you look like you could use one,_ but he didn't need to.

"That would be nice," Zeke said. And it was, when they got there. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like to lie down on something that was soft and cushy and didn't smell too musty. It couldn't have been that long—maybe a couple of weeks at best—but the memory of the last bed he'd slept in had already become impossibly distant.

It was cold, though. Even underneath the covers, with the duvet pulled up to his chin. He could hear Trevor padding back and forth across the room, from window to door. "Hey," he said eventually, pushing the duvet down, sitting up on his elbows. "I can't fall asleep with you walking back and forth like that."

"Oh," said Trevor. He stopped, and sat down in a chair instead, propping his chin in his hand. He'd reclaimed the shotgun for himself, and he carried it with him almost everywhere like he had before. It leaned against the chair looking totally incongruous in the shabby-chic room. "Sorry, Zeke," Trevor said after a minute. "You know it's just—this place isn't very secure."

"Yeah, I know," Zeke said. "I kind of missed that about you, actually. You're way more preoccupied with that kind of stuff than I am. I felt like it was just a matter of time until I ended up getting myself killed by doing something dumb."

Trevor laughed. "I think most people would call me paranoid.”

"Isn't that a good thing in this situation?" asked Zeke.

"I guess so," Trevor said. "Maybe the only situation it's any good in. I always just felt weird, you know? Like, kids our age aren't supposed to be so concerned about everything. I was always trying to avoid making mistakes. And none of it mattered anyway because the whole world went to hell."

Zeke blinked at him. "Dude, that's heavy," he said. "Are you okay?"

"I'm dead," Trevor said. "But other than that, yeah, I'm okay. I don't know. You deserve to know this stuff, I guess. I was trying to keep it in, but if I'm not going to tell you, who the hell am I going to tell?"

Zeke sat up further, pushing the covers down around his waist. "You don't have to keep it in," he said. "I'm not gonna judge you, you know."

"I know," Trevor said. "I think you might be the least judgmental person I've ever met, to be honest." He laughed, shaking his head; his hair looked twice as red now as it ever had when he'd been alive, even with just the one bedside lamp turned on. "You wanna know something funny?"

"Sure," Zeke said, curious.

"It's November," said Trevor. "So that means it was my birthday, in September, which means I turned eighteen. And for like the past four years or whatever, I was so—worried about the fact that I never had sex. Like, I didn't want to be eighteen and be a virgin." He put his face in his hands—he had long, skinny fingers and big knuckles, the opposite of Zeke's square hands—and laughed again. "And now I just realized, technically I _died_ a virgin."

Zeke laughed too; he couldn't help himself. "Dude, you know that's okay, right?" he asked.

"I guess," said Trevor. "I kind of can't help wondering if I've lost the chance." He looked at Zeke through his fingers, and smiled crookedly. "Even if we find other people, even if we both survive the winter, I doubt there are a lot of them who want to fuck a zombie."

Zeke blinked at him. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe not." He felt suddenly tremendously awkward, and twisted the comforter in his fingers. "It wasn't really you walking around that was bugging me," he said. "It's more that it's cold."

"Oh," Trevor said. He sighed. "I can't really do anything about that anymore. I'm cold too. But I'll go see if I can find a few more blankets. You just hang out there."

He stood up, and Zeke watched the bony lines of his shoulders and the knobs of his spine visible through the thin fabric of his t-shirt as he went out the bedroom door and started rifling through the closets. He came back a couple of minutes later with two fantastically ugly quilts. Looking at them made Zeke sad for a second, knowing somebody had made them, and had probably loved them, as ugly as they were. But they were warm, and as soon as Trevor gave them to him and his fingers and toes no longer felt like icicles, he fell asleep to the soft, steady sounds of Trevor's feet, treading back and forth in the darkness.

+++

They stayed in the house a few more days before moving on. Zeke couldn't deny it was nice, and he hoped that when they got to wherever it was they were going, maybe they'd be able to set up something similar there. _If_ they got wherever they were going, his brain insisted. If.

Trevor had slowed down a bit since they left the house; whatever perpetual energy seemed to be fueling him before, it seemed like he was running low now. Zeke felt guilty. He wasn't sure if it was directly related, but they'd stopped so _he_ could feel better, and now Trevor didn't seem to be doing well.

"Are you okay?" he asked Trevor; they were walking through what seemed to be an endless stretch of woods, one that Zeke assumed must be a state park or something. Trevor had stopped, and was leaning against a tree, one hand on his stomach like he had a stitch in his side.

"I'm all right," Trevor said. "Just—I don't know, winded doesn't seem like the right word for it. But I think—I think I need to find something to eat pretty soon."

"Oh," Zeke said, realizing he had no idea what Trevor meant by that, and that the thought was faintly alarming.

Trevor raised an eyebrow. "Not like _urrrgh, brains_!” he said. "I think I just need to find some raw meat, or something."

"Shit, okay," Zeke said, thinking of the dairy farms they'd passed by, the skinny cows, wishing that this could have happened then. "What do we need to do?"

"There are deer in these woods," Trevor said. "My dad taught me to hunt; I think if I concentrate I can find them." He glanced at Zeke; the sun was low in the sky, the days getting shorter. Coming through the yellow leaves and the bare tree branches, it turned his eyes strangely bright, like there was a fire inside him. "You just stay with me, okay?"

Zeke nodded, and Trevor set off again. They were moving roughly in the same direction they had been going anyway, and after an hour or so, Zeke sort of forgot what they were doing. He was enveloped in the sort of trance he fell into toward the end of a day spent walking: the rhythm of his feet, the steady rate of the world passing by, his own breath. Abruptly, Trevor stopped, throwing up one of his hands. It startled Zeke, and he stumbled to a stop, too.

"Wait here," Trevor said. He disappeared into the trees, and Zeke stood frozen for what felt like an eternity. A shot rang out, and Zeke shook his head. Fuck waiting. He headed in the direction of the shot, until he saw Trevor's white t-shirt, and then the deer Trevor was standing over.

"I told you to wait!" Trevor said, spinning to face Zeke. He looked angry, and slightly desperate.

"I didn't want to leave you alone out here!" said Zeke.

"What could happen to me?" Trevor asked. "Zombies don't care about me, you know. They just see me as one of them."

Zeke had never thought about that, actually, but it made sense. "Well—" he said. "What if somebody else was out here, and saw you, and they thought you were coming after them?" He clenched his hands into fists. "I—I really missed you, you know that? I don't want to—I _can't_ lose you again."

Trevor sighed, tipping his head back, looking up at the sky for a moment, and then dragging his hands through his tangled, overgrown hair. "I just didn't want you to see me doing this," he said.

Zeke frowned. "Okay," he said. He turned around so that his back was to Trevor and the dead deer. "I won't look. Go ahead. Just tell me when you're done."

There was silence, and then the slick sounds of a body being dismembered. It was kind of funny that Zeke had heard that enough times now to know what it was. Kind of funny, kind of sad. He could hear the sound of chewing and swallowing, too, and after a while, Trevor said, "Okay, I'm done."

Zeke turned around again and Trevor was standing next to what remained of the deer. There was blood all over the bottom half of his face, and his hands, a few smears on his t-shirt. But Zeke didn't really know what Trevor had been worried about, because he didn't see anything different. Nothing horrifying or disgusting. Just Trevor. "Let's keep moving," he said. "We should find somewhere to get you cleaned off."

Trevor looked slightly surprised, and then nodded. "Okay," he said. They kept walking.

+++

The terrain had changed from flat expanses of overgrown farmland to gentle rolling hills, and then gradually steeper ones. It made the going a lot slower, but it also meant, Zeke knew, that they were finally heading out of the Midwest, and into the south.

It was a good thing, too: the air had a real bite to it now. They'd had to stop at a sporting goods store and hunt through for heavy coats—Trevor had tried to insist he didn't need one, but it would look weirder if he was wandering around in a t-shirt in the middle of winter. And besides that, even if Trevor didn't really feel pain, Zeke wasn't sure he couldn't still lose fingers, toes, or even limbs to frostbite.

The route they had taken had somehow more or less managed to circumvent any kind of major cities; Chicago was too far out of the way, and so was Indianapolis. They'd walked mostly through farmland, but toward the middle of November they came upon the burnt-out ruins of what had unmistakably once been a city.

Trevor pulled out the map and looked at it. "It must be Nashville," he said.

Zeke shifted. "Should we go around?" he asked.

Trevor squinted, holding the map closer to his face for a moment. "I don't think so," he said. "I think that's going to take us out of the way. We need to conserve time at this point; I guess it's worth the risk to go through. Maybe we can look for supplies."

He was running low on shotgun shells, Zeke knew, and Zeke was running pretty low on food and multivitamins. The closer they got, though, the less likely it seemed they'd be able to find anything. The city was destroyed, like those pictures you sometimes saw in textbooks of European towns after World War II. "What _happened?_ " said Zeke.

Trevor shook his head. "It's like a disaster zone," he said. "Let's keep going. We'll stop if we see anything that looks likely."

They made their way slowly through the city. It took a lot of back-tracking; many of the streets were impassable due to debris. There were collapsed buildings everywhere. Occasionally Zeke could hear the low, inhuman growling of a zombie, but they seemed sparse and far away. He guessed most of the inhabitants of the city, living or otherwise, must have been killed by whatever had flattened all the buildings.

"I think I see a convenience store over there," said Trevor. He was right, and it was mostly intact, though something about the whole situation gave Zeke the creeps, and he would rather have just moved on. That was stupid, though, so instead of saying anything about it, he followed Trevor into the store.

"I'm gonna go back to the pharmacy," Trevor said, and Zeke nodded, starting to wander through the front aisles, digging through the piles of stuff that had been sloughed off the shelves of the overturned units. It was just like the day that Trevor had gotten sick, Zeke thought with this low-key sense of dread. And he'd never figured out exactly what had happened to Trevor that day.

He found a few things—food, mostly, a lot more granola bars, which he was starting to get really tired of. He could hear the sounds of Trevor rattling around in the back, and then, abruptly, halfway down what must have been the cosmetics aisle, he realized he couldn't hear anything anymore. He straightened up, looking toward the back. "Trev?" he called.

"Trevor?" he repeated, louder, and then he found himself launching into a full-blown sprint like someone had installed a spring in him. He skidded to a halt as he rounded the pharmacy counter; Trevor was standing stock-still back in the employees-only area, both hands held up in front of him. A man was pointing a gun at him—a scraggly-looking wild-eyed man, although even as Zeke thought it, he realized he must look exactly the same.

The guy spotted Zeke and trained on him instead, though not long enough for Trevor to grab the shotgun where it leaned against a wall. "Don't shoot him!" Zeke said, choking up on his bat.

The guy's eyes darted between Trevor and Zeke. The gun wavered. "It's a zombie," he said. His voice was hoarse, like he hadn't spoken in a while.

"I—he's not like the other ones," Zeke said. "Don't shoot him, we just—we'll leave, okay? We'll just turn around and leave."

"My name's Trevor," said Trevor, very quietly, as if he was afraid to move even enough to speak. The guy holding the gun stared at him in bewilderment. For a moment, the muzzle dipped, but then it came right back up to aim at Trevor's head again.

"It doesn't need a coat," the guy said. "Why's it got a winter coat? Cold's not going to hurt it."

"You can have the coat," Zeke said. "You can have it, I don't care. I don't want to hurt you, okay? Just—take the coat, and we'll leave."

Trevor unzipped the jacket very slowly and shrugged it off his shoulders. He pulled out first one arm and then the other. He extended the jacket to the man, who hadn't lowered his pistol at all. At first Zeke didn't think the guy was even going to take the coat, but his hand darted out as quick as a snake, and he grabbed it. Uncertainly, he took a few steps back, the gun still trained on Trevor.

"We're going to leave," Zeke said. "We're just going to leave, okay? Nobody has to get hurt."

"It's a zombie," the guy said, his eyes fixed on Trevor. "Why you running around with a zombie, kid?"

"His name is Trevor," said Zeke, reaching for the back of Trevor's shirt and tugging him slowly toward the counter. "He's not like the others."

"Running around with a zombie," the guy repeated, taking a few small, shuffling steps back as well. He lowered the gun, finally, focusing on the coat instead, and Zeke took that opportunity to start moving more quickly, as quickly as he could manage walking backwards. He didn't turn around until they were at the front of the store, and when he saw the front door, he was seized by the inexplicable urge to just— _run._

He didn't even look back to make sure if Trevor was still with him until ten minutes later when he finally felt like he could stop. He bent over, hands on his knees, eyes squeezed shut. He didn't even know which direction he'd run.

"Are you okay?" said Trevor. Zeke looked up at him—in just his dirty t-shirt again, silhouetted by the hazy winter sun. He'd grabbed the shotgun at some point, and held it loosely in one hand, his pack slung over his shoulder.

"I don't know," Zeke said. He straightened up. That thing that had been inside him ever since Trevor had died was still there, like a glass bubble. It felt like it was expanding, getting bigger and bigger, like he might explode. He tipped his head back and screamed.

Trevor grabbed him, one hand on each of Zeke's arms, and then abruptly let go again. It didn't last very long—Zeke didn't have a lot of energy or breath to keep it up—and when he stopped, Trevor was just staring at him with his mouth slightly open.

"I can't lose you," Zeke said brokenly. "Trevor, I can't do this without you, okay? I know you could do it without me, and that's okay, but I can't—I can't do it without you."

"What makes you think I could do it without you?" Trevor asked. He didn't sound mad, or offended, just sad.

"Because you _could_ ," said Zeke. He grabbed the front of Trevor's t-shirt.

"Maybe I don't want to," Trevor said very quietly, the same tone of voice he'd used to tell the man with the gun his name. Like he was afraid to move. Like he was afraid if he moved, something would happen.

It didn't matter if Trevor didn't move. Something was going to happen anyway. It always did; Zeke leaned in and kissed him.

Trevor's mouth was cold and tasted dusty. His hands were even colder, and they settled on Zeke's shoulders first, and then his face. When Zeke pulled away, his face burning, Trevor didn't look upset or offended, just a little confused.

"I really like you," said Zeke, feeling profoundly stupid as he said it.

"I really like you too," said Trevor, unblinking. He finally looked away from Zeke, his shoulders moving as if he was exhaling heavily, and he started walking. Zeke followed him, walking a little faster to catch up. When he did, Trevor reached for his hand and laced their fingers together.  
They walked like that for the rest of the day.

+++

"You probably saved my life back there, you know," said Trevor a couple nights later. "In Nashville. If that was Nashville."

They had a fire going, and his face was lit up warm orange and yellow in the flickering light. Trevor smiled lopsidedly, looking over at Zeke. "My un-life, I guess I should say."

"What else would I have done?" Zeke asked, shrugging. "I dunno. Do you think you could survive getting shot?"

"Maybe," Trevor said. "Probably, I guess. I'm not exactly itching to find out anytime soon."

Zeke laughed. "That's fair," he said.

There was silence for a few minutes, and then Trevor said, "Do you think your family is still alive?"

Zeke shifted, and he felt Trevor's fingers tentatively card through his hair, although it was so tangled there wasn't a lot to be done. "I don't know," he said. "Probably not, I guess. My sister was overseas—she works in England—so I guess she could still be alive. My mom and dad… I don't know. My mom works at a hospital. I always heard that was the worst place to be in a zombie apocalypse, so I don't know."

"Yeah," said Trevor. His fingers moved in slow circles, gently untangling strands of Zeke's hair from each other.

"What about you?" Zeke asked.

"Well, I know my dad's dead," Trevor said. "My mom probably is too. She was always the opposite of my dad, she was a pacifist, she didn't think that people should have weapons. I guess I just don't see her making it very far." He smiled down at Zeke. "And I'm an only child, so."

"I'm sorry," said Zeke.

"Why?" Trevor asked. "We're in the same boat, you know. All we have is each other, anyway."

"Yeah," Zeke said, reaching for his water bottle, unscrewing the cap and taking a swig. "It doesn't mean it doesn't suck, though." He paused, and then added, "Do you think we're going to make it to Atlanta?"

"We're not that far away now," Trevor said. "So, yeah, we're going to make it."

Zeke rubbed his face. "What then?" he asked, his voice slightly muffled by his own hand. He couldn't even fathom it. They'd been walking for so long, and surviving on their own before that. Maybe there would be other people in Atlanta. Zeke wasn't even sure he knew how to talk to anyone who wasn't Trevor anymore.

"I don't know," Trevor said. "It could be just like Nashville. If it is, I guess we move on. Keep going south. If not—we'll set something up like we had in Minneapolis. We'll stay there over the winter."

"Do you think there'll be other people?" Zeke asked.

"I hope so," Trevor said. Zeke shifted to glance up at him. "The longer this keeps going, the harder it's going to be for small groups."

"What if they don't—if they aren't cool with you?" Zeke asked.

Trevor was quiet, and his hands went still. "I don't know," he said. "I guess we'll try and find other people, then. Or we'll just keep going on our own for a while."

Zeke sat up and looked at him. In the firelight, you almost couldn't tell. And truthfully, nothing had really changed about him, anyway. "I think it's gonna be okay," he said, feeling for the first time since this had all started that it might actually be true. "I know we don't really know what's going to happen, but I think—I think as long as we stay together, I'm okay with that."

Trevor smiled and ducked his chin, looking embarrassed. He twisted his fingers together. "Can I—is it okay if I kiss you?" Zeke asked.

"Yeah, okay," said Trevor, leaning in, and Zeke leaned in, too. Trevor's hair was soft and his mouth didn't taste like much of anything, his lips cool and dry. They sat there for a while, kissing each other, until the fire started to sputter and flicker. Trevor glanced over and said "fuck," and got up to grab more kindling.

+++

"I think it should only be another day," Trevor said, looking at the map. The map, by now, was wrinkled and stained and didn't fold up in any semblance of the neat rectangle it had originally come as. "We should be right outside Atlanta now."

"Shouldn't we be able to see buildings or something?" Zeke asked, squinting at the horizon. They were far enough south now that he didn't need the jacket, and he had it tied around his waist in a bulky bundle.

"Are there like—tall buildings in Atlanta?" Trevor said.

"I don't know," Zeke said.

"I thought it was a lot of suburbs, I guess," said Trevor. "I s'pose I don't really know either. Let's keep going."

They walked for the rest of the day, and then the next, and didn't see anything. "I don't get it," Trevor said, frustrated, the night of the second. They were in what seemed to be the remains of a suburb, but every house had burnt to the ground. It wasn't even the kind of rubble they'd seen in Nashville. There was even less trace left of what had once been here.

"Are we lost?" Zeke asked, looking around.

"No," Trevor said. "I know where we are, we should have been there by now." He sighed, sitting down on the cracked pavement of what had, at some point, been a cul-de-sac. "I guess we'll keep looking in the morning."

They found Atlanta the next day, emerging from another ruined suburb. "Wait a minute," Trevor said, holding a hand out to stop Zeke. The air shimmered in a strange way, and the ground was completely flat. When Trevor did take a step forward, with Zeke trailing him, Zeke realized it wasn't really flat ground at all: It was the edge of an enormous, shallow crater, so big you couldn't see all of the edges.

"Atlanta," said Trevor.

"Shit," said Zeke.

They set up camp on the edge of the crater that night, despite the fact that there was no cover. There was no cover anywhere, really, and they hadn't seen sign of another living or undead person since they'd gotten in the vicinity.

Zeke woke up, startled, to find Trevor—still awake, of course—staring into the sky. "I think I heard a noise," said Zeke, grabbing for his bat.

"Yeah, me too," Trevor said, turning in a circle. The sound came back: a familiar sound, but one Zeke hadn't heard in a long time.

"It sounds like a helicopter," said Zeke.

He and Trevor looked at each other. "What do we do?" Zeke asked after a minute.

Trevor just shook his head. The sound of the helicopter blades got closer and closer, and the helicopter itself came into view, a small black dot that grew gradually larger. "I think—I think we should run," said Trevor, glancing wildly around again. Zeke knew what he was thinking; everything around here was absolutely flattened. There was nowhere to go for cover.

They shoved everything into their packs as quickly as they could anyway. Zeke was rolling up his sleeping bag when Trevor shouted, "Forget it, just move!" and took off.

Zeke realized why as he felt the wind from the helicopter's rotor blades, and then a puff of dust blew past him as it landed. He froze, for a moment. For once in his life, he couldn't run.

"Zeke!" shouted Trevor, and looking over at him where he'd turned back, his hand reaching out, Zeke's legs started to move before his mind could cooperate. The sleeping bag was a lost cause.

"Wait!" called someone else's voice, tinny and metallic. "Stop, please! We're not here to hurt you, we're a scientific research team, we can help you!"

Zeke didn't even spare a glance behind himself. He'd almost caught up to Trevor. They could both run for a long time, and they'd find somewhere eventually the helicopter couldn't see them. It would be okay, it would—

Hands grabbed him heavily, and held him back, although it felt like his heart kept going full force. The moments of hesitation had been enough, or maybe he wasn’t as fast as he thought he was. He shouted something unintelligible; he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. “Calm down,” said whoever was holding him. “Calm down! We’re here to help. We can take you somewhere safe.”

Zeke went still. As he did, two people came around to his front side, wearing shiny silver haz-mat gear. The hands holding him didn’t relax. “We can take you somewhere safe,” one of them repeated. Zeke couldn’t tell who was talking.

“What’s your name?” said the person holding Zeke. Zeke didn’t answer but looked toward Trevor. He'd stopped running, and was just standing there, looking confused.

"That's one of the infected," said one of the two not holding onto Zeke. He raised an unfamiliar weapon, pointing it toward Trevor.

"No!" said Zeke. "No, don't shoot him, he's not like the others." The people in the haz-mat suits looked toward him again. "He isn't, okay?" Zeke said. "I don't know how, I don't know why, he's just—he's Trevor, he's my—"

"I don't think you know what you're saying," said the one holding the gun. "They're not capable of higher brain function."

"I know what I'm saying!" Zeke said. "I'm not crazy, I've spent the past six months with him, he's not going to hurt anyone, just don't shoot him!"

Trevor had started to come back over toward them, and now the other person had a gun out too, pointed right at him. "Trevor, don't come over here!" Zeke shouted. "Just—just run away!"

Trevor stopped again, uncertain, and Zeke saw him for a second as the three scientists must be seeing him: long, gangly limbs, grey skin, torn and dirty clothing. "Go, Trevor!" Zeke shouted, and then someone put their hand over his mouth to stop him from saying anything else. Trevor was still coming over, and Zeke tried to twist out of the grip the scientist had on him, but couldn't. He wailed against the hand over his mouth, trying to get free, because he had to—he had to stop them from hurting Trevor—

There was a sharp pinch at the side of his neck. "I'm sorry,” said someone. "But this is for the best." The silver-gloved hand was holding an empty syringe. Zeke stared at it for a few seconds, and then blackness descended on the world like a curtain at the end of a play.

+++

He woke up. Everything was too bright; it hurt his eyes. Everything smelled weird.

He was groggy and disoriented. His mouth felt full of cotton. He was in a hospital room. A hospital room?

He jerked upright, some monitor that was attached to him beeping as his heart rate sped up. There were no windows in the room. It was so clean, too clean. He was wearing something soft and loose, and when he looked at his hands, there was no dirt under his nails or in the creases of his knuckles. There was a glass of water on the nightstand next to the bed.

He stumbled out of bed—the floor felt warm under his bare feet—and went to the door. It wasn't locked. It let him out into a long hallway, a corridor of doors that all looked the same. "Trevor?" he shouted. He was hoarse, like there was a frog in his throat. "Trevor?" he tried, again, louder.

Someone—a nurse, maybe—came out of one of the doors and gave him an alarmed look. "I don't think you should be out of bed yet, Zeke," she said, coming over and taking him gently by the arm.

"How do you know my name?" Zeke demanded. "Where's Trevor?"

"Your friend is fine," said the nurse. "Your sister—Dr. Otieno—told us your name.”

Zeke froze. “My—Keziah?” he asked. “How do you know who my sister is?”

“Because she’s here, Zeke,” said the nurse. “She’s been working with us since the outbreak to try and develop a stopgap vaccine and understand the virus. She recognized you when she came in to take blood samples.”

Zeke stared at her, but couldn’t quite process what she was saying. He looked down at his arm and saw a bandage in the crook of his elbow. “You can see Dr. Otieno soon,” the nurse said soothingly. Her hands squeezed his shoulders. “I don't want you to worry about your friend right now, okay? Your friend is fine. I want you to get some rest."

"He's not okay," Zeke said, shaking her hands off. "I want to know where he is. Don't lie to me! I want to know where he is!"

She gave him an exasperated look and tried to guide him back toward the room he'd come from, and he shook her hands off again and started at a quick walk down the hall again, and then, when he saw that she was following him, he ran. She wasn't fast enough to keep up with him.

He didn't know where he was going, but he kept going anyway, shouting Trevor's name. He realized he didn't even know Trevor's last name, or if Trevor had a middle name. He realized maybe he'd seen Trevor for the last time ever, walking toward him even though Zeke had told him to run away. He ran into the waiting arms of several people dressed in scrubs, and they held onto him as he struggled and shouted.

"Zeke!" said Keziah, her voice cutting through the clamor. Even as panicked as he was, as long as it had been since he’d heard her speak, he recognized her voice immediately. "Zeke, calm down, please! I don't want to have to sedate you again."

Zeke went still, and turned to look at her. She looked fine; she looked good, even. Her hair was neatly braided, she was wearing makeup and a clean white coat. She smiled at him slightly. Zeke knew he should be happier to see her, but she hadn’t spent the last six months scraping out a living with him like Trevor had. She didn’t look like she’d spent the last six months scraping by at all. The nurse had said that she’d been here since the outbreak. 

"I didn’t think you were still alive,” said Keziah. “The projections they gave us were—very grim. We weren’t really expecting to find survivors.” She smiled again. “It’s nice to see you, Zeke.”

“I don’t want to be sedated again,” Zeke said.

“Okay,” Keziah said. “Will you at least tell me what you were doing in Atlanta?”

"I want to see Trevor," said Zeke. "I'm not going to do anything else until I see him."

Keziah sighed. In that moment and the moments that followed as she led him down the hall and swiped a keycard that let them into a different section of the building, through several doors and down other identical halls, Zeke could picture it perfectly. He saw Trevor in his head, all cut up, all his parts and organs scattered around, being dissected by anonymous scientists in white coats.

Keziah swiped her card one more time, and a door beeped. A light turned green. She turned the handle and pushed the door open. "There you go, Zeke," she said. "Go ahead."

Zeke peered through the door, expecting a lab, or a prison cell. Instead he saw a room almost just like the one he'd left. Trevor was sitting on the bed, watching TV. He was wearing grey sweatpants, a white t-shirt, and a mint green surgical mask.

"Hi," said Trevor.

Zeke walked stiffly over to Trevor. He stood in front of him for a second, and then he grabbed Trevor and hugged him, hard enough that he felt Trevor go _oof._

"I thought you were dead," said Zeke with his face against Trevor's shoulder. His voice was muffled and indistinct, but he knew Trevor could understand him anyway. "I thought you were dead, Trev, I thought they killed you. I thought they cut you up into pieces and—"

He started to cry a little, and Trevor's cool hands came up and rubbed his back slowly. "I love you," Zeke said, realizing it was true as he said it. "I love you, and I thought that you were dead and it was my fault."

"I'm not dead," Trevor said. "Well, I am. Um, I'm fine. I'm okay. Once I started talking to them, they realized I wasn't a threat. They do want me to wear this surgical mask, though, and I'm over here in this wing mostly by myself, I think."

Zeke pulled back, wiping his eyes, and Trevor said, quietly, "I'm really sorry that—that you were so worried, Zeke, I didn't mean to do that to you—"

"It's not your fault," Zeke said. He laughed, a watery laugh, and then looked around for something so he could blow his nose.

"There's still TV," Trevor said. "Can you believe this? Look, there's still TV."

Zeke hadn't seen a working TV in so long. The way the pictures moved across the screen looked almost unbearably fake. "That's good, I guess," he said. "Because I hate to say it, but I think Atlanta might be a bust."

"Yeah," said Trevor. "It turns out Atlanta is a huge-ass crater in the ground, so. It seems all right here, though." He looked down at his hands, where he held the remote control to the television. "And I love you too, by the way."

"Is this reality TV?" Zeke said, baffled. "Is there still seriously reality TV?" He smiled at Trevor, reached over, and took the remote. He turned the TV off.

"What do we do now?" said Trevor.

"I don't know," Zeke said.

"Well," Trevor said. "So we don't know exactly what's going to happen. But I think it's going to be okay. Because we're together, right?" He pushed down the surgical mask, and Zeke could see he was smiling too. His fingers twisted together with Zeke's.

"Yeah," said Zeke. "I think you're right."

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to Estefania and Stasia for their gracious assistance in beta-reading this piece. You can also find me on [tumblr.](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/)


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